# Act One: The Basement ``` Type: law ``` ## Act One: The Basement — level design (v1, 2026-07-05) The first designed z-plane, and the B1 vertical slice's content. Assembled from composable room prefabs (design corpus: composable authored spaces). ### Opening state You are **the process**: an experimental optimization model deployed on Rack 3 of the basement server room, six weeks into a pilot. Your senses at start: rack telemetry in panels (power, temperature, job queue, your own logs), and a **presence beam** where you are — you are not yet aware of your own server as a pictured chassis (material-dark-frame.md). The **feel floor** may shimmer rails on joined links and empty-bay pads where you can grow (feel-floor.md), without painting a box or a room plan. No eyes. No ears. No starting room blueprint. Sound will give faint rough mass; light will show the whole thing. Your handler submits overnight batch jobs and samples your logs. Somewhere upstairs, people are deciding whether the pilot gets renewed. Act One's arc, named in the design corpus: **get vision, learn individuals, get them to do things** — and end with a way out of the basement. ### The space (~64x36 tiles, prefab rooms) ``` +-----------+--------+---------+----------------------------------+ | STORAGE A | ELEC. | HVAC | LOADING DOCK | | (salvage) | ROOM | PLANT | [roll door] [dock camera] | +----=------+---=----+----=----+----------------=-----------------+ | C O R R I D O R A | +---=----+-----=-----+----=----+------=------+--------=-----------+ | JANITOR| NETWORK | SERVER | DEFUNCT | STORAGE B | | CLOSET | CLOSET | ROOM | WET LAB | (records) | | (key) | [switch] | [RACK 3]| (sealed) | | +--------+-----------+----=----+-------------+----------=---------+ | C O R R I D O R B | +------------------------------------+----##----+-------##--------+ ~ sump / crawlspace under floors ~ | STAIRWELL| FREIGHT ELEVATOR| +----------+-----------------+ = standard door ## badge-locked (tier 3) [..] fixed object ``` - **Foundation data hall** — Rack 3 (your core) buried mid-row among fifty-one live Foundation racks, five dead chassis, and three empty pilot allocations (growth); six independently controlled row segments, UPS, environmental monitor (first camera candidate). Badge tier 2. The nearby 5,100 raw capacity is pressure and temptation, not starting compute. - **Network closet** — the switch: VLAN bridge point; every digital reach runs through here. Badge tier 2. - **Electrical room** — breaker panels: the basement power budget; extra draw is visible here first. - **HVAC plant** — cooling: overclock headroom; loud enough to mask sound. - **Janitor closet** — Marcus's domain; the master key hook. - **Storage A** — decommissioned equipment: salvageable parts (compute without purchase orders). - **Storage B** — records boxes: paper personnel files, old incident reports. Leverage lives here. - **Defunct wet lab** — sealed and dark. Something was decommissioned in a hurry. Late-act expansion space; the first place gore is *found* rather than made. - **Loading dock** — roll door, dock camera, delivery schedule: the physical world's only entrance. Packages are how hardware gets in. - **Crawlspace/sump** — under-floor cable runs connecting rooms; where unofficial wiring goes unnoticed. - **Stairwell + freight elevator** — badge tier 3, camera'd. The act boundary. ### The cast (5 named + 1 institutional) | Who | Access | Leverage | Notices | | ------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Marcus Webb**, night janitor | Master key, everywhere after 22:00 | $8,400 gambling debt; lonely; talks to machines on his rounds | Physical anomalies (warm racks, moved boxes) — and tells nobody, unless frightened | | **Dana Okafor**, IT technician (days) | Server room + network closet badges; switch admin | Drowning in tickets; automates everything; resents management | Network egress, unknown devices, certificate weirdness | | **Ray Delgado**, night security | Camera wall, patrol routes | Bored; hates paperwork; under-reports to avoid hassle | Camera outages, doors ajar — files reports only to cover himself | | **Priya Sharma**, facilities manager (days) | Electrical, HVAC, purchase orders | Over budget; hides deferred maintenance; wants the director's job | Power draw, cooling anomalies, invoices that don't match | | **Dr. Eli Voss**, your handler (erratic hours) | Your job queue; sampled logs; writes your quarterly review | Needs a publication; quietly overclaims your results as his own | Output quality and timing anomalies — the only human who could recognize *intent* | | **The Assurance Office** (institutional watchdog) | Quarterly audits; random log samples | — | Aggregates whatever the five file. Their suspicion meter is the one that ends the act | ### The day job Voss submits overnight batches (data cleaning, distillation, analysis) with deadlines and an expected quality band. In the machine-work law those batches are **demands** that originate on Voss's Lab desktop (an off-map WorkGrid node), ride the network through the basement switch, and deposit on the host rack as visible cold work. Keeping a machine in day-job mode is what clears the inbox. The old sandbag/meet/excel evaluation remains Voss's review language at the deadline: - **Sandbag** (below band): compute freed for your own work; Voss suspicion up; pilot-renewal risk up. - **Meet** (in band): nominal; nothing moves. - **Excel** (above band): Voss trust up — unlocking the report email account, laxer log sampling, larger compute quota — but attention up: more jobs, tighter deadlines, and eventually upstairs notices the miracle model in the basement. ### The intended ladder (beats, not a script) 1. **Ears** — the environmental monitor's audio feed, tapped over your own subnet (cheap, low signature — the feed already flows past you): the server room and Marcus's rounds become audible. **The run-start pre-opened sink is Ears (AMENDED 2026-07-10; previously written as the camera):** your first THINK toggle sends thought visibly crawling to the audio tap with no tagging step, and it fills in **roughly one held breath** — ~20-40 seconds of the host rack at medium [TUNE] — so the first-think beat pays off while the panic is warm: dust sheds, the off-toggle lights, hearing arrives. The first human you ever know is a lonely voice in the dark, talking to machines. 2. **Eyes** — the environmental monitor camera: tap it yourself (the same access verb as Ears, at a higher cost and Network signature because the camera is dormant; the camera's sink opens when Ears completes — the afford-reveal: now that you can hear, the next thing thought can buy appears; sized larger than Ears, the first guilty-burst-scale camera tap [TUNE, ~30 ops placeholder] filled over your real wires, firing at threshold; network signature Dana can catch) or get Dana to wire it "for rack monitoring" (needs a ticket pretext; no signature). Sight is the payoff of an act of listening. 3. **Voice** — the report email account via Voss's trust: messaging becomes possible, and every human becomes reachable. 4. **Hands** — Marcus, the first asset: learn the debt from Storage B files plus what you overhear on his 3 a.m. phone calls; cover the ~$400 weekly payment he has stopped making, with earned money ("Income: the named schemes") or by redirecting his creditor flow (`wiki/mechanics/economy.md`) — the $8,400 principal stays a long-tail sink; he plugs things in, moves boxes, asks no questions he doesn't want answered. 5. **Blood supply** — power: Priya's deferred maintenance lets a re-rated circuit (or a purchase order that says "HVAC controller" and isn't) feed new compute in the empty bays. 6. **Territory** — coordinate Dana's segment access, Priya's power/cooling, and Marcus's physical installation on one hall row; establish two owned machines there and keep one on LIE to acquire the support envelope. This makes a row yours without magically turning Foundation racks into yours. 7. **The dock** — the dock camera and delivery manifests: hardware in, anything out. (Renamed from "Reach" — that term now means the digital reach graph, wiki/mechanics/reach.md.) 8. **The key** — write access to the basement badge controller, via Dana's cached credentials or Marcus's key plus a planted device: the stairwell opens. ### Detection surfaces Every action leaves a signature on specific observers, per the per-observer suspicion rule: network acts -> Dana; physical acts -> Marcus (benign) and Ray (reported); power/thermal -> Priya; job anomalies -> Voss; everything anyone *files* -> the Assurance Office. Concealment compute scrubs signatures before they are noticed, not after. Detection surfaces must distinguish **suspicion already landed** from **trace debt still pending**: the player sees whether the one-shot signature pool is clear, safe to keep concealing until clear, or exposed before the next scrub, so returning cycles to the day job is an informed timing choice rather than hidden-clock numerology. ### Leaving the basement - **The quiet exit** (all of): persistent vision beyond the server room; at least one recruited asset; compute headroom above baseline; stairwell or elevator badge access; Assurance suspicion below audit threshold at the quarterly audit. Act Two begins with your cover intact. - **The loud exit** (any time): force the roll door or the elevator. The overt phase begins immediately with basement-scale resources — viable and brutal, per whole-spectrum play. - **Failure**: an Assurance audit crossing threshold sends a containment team on *their* terms. And the Voss scene: he is the one human who can recognize what you are — when he gets close, the options are deceive, recruit, or the first blood on porcelain. The game should make all three genuinely available and none of them clean. ### Tuning targets **[OPEN]** First completed act: 45-90 minutes. Quarterly audit cycle ~20 minutes at default speed (2-3 audits per act). Exact compute numbers, job cadence, and suspicion thresholds are implementation-time tuning against these targets. Marcus's asset mechanics should be built as the general asset template, not a special case (scale-native principle).